Raising Hope
by EstelRaca
Summary: Akira and Takatora do their best by their siblings, from before the series starts, when they first become caregivers, to after the series ends, when they have watched their little brothers make choices and now all have to live with the consequences.


**Author's Note: **This was written for Yuletide, for Estirose's prompt of comparing and contrasting the two sibling sets in Gaim. Spoilers for the whole show are within.

_Raising Hope_

_I am ready for this._

Takatora is utter confidence as he approaches Mitsuzane's room, his father's words still echoing in his ear. How long has it been since his father praised him like that—told him that he had not only met but exceeded expectations? Told him that he was _proud_ of the man that Takatora is growing into, of how Takatora has risen to meet challenges that none of them would have expected?

(He will not doubt the words, the timing, the motives.)

Takatora knocks before entering Mitsuzane's room.

He hears a flurry of movement, more than the simple act of raising his head to face the door should necessitate, but there are only textbooks on Mitsuzane's bed when Takatora opens the door, only bland boredom in Mitsuzane's expression.

Takatora studies the boy before him with narrowed eyes. Now is not the time to press Mitsuzane on whatever contraband he is hiding, though. "You'll be leaving with me tomorrow morning, Mitsuzane. We're moving to Zawame City, to oversee Yggdrasil operations personally."

Mitsuzane blinks, clearly startled. "All of us?"

"No." Takatora waits just a beat, long enough for Mitsuzane to start putting the pieces together himself. "Father needs to stay here—and to travel. To continue to build support for... for Yggdrasil. Since this would interfere in your schooling, and since the school in Zawame is top-notch, you'll be coming with me."

Something that looks surprisingly like hope blooms in Mitsuzane's eyes. "Does... that mean that you'll be making the rules now? Taking care of me?"

"It does mean that I'll be taking care of you." Takatora crosses the room, reaches out to pat Mitsuzane on the shoulder. "But the rules won't change."

Whatever tender emotion it was growing in Mitsuzane's expression fades away, and there is something surprisingly like hurt in the way he ducks out from under Takatora's hand. "Does Father really think I'm that useless?"

"He thinks you need to finish your schooling." Takatora hesitates before smiling at his younger brother. "Once you do, I'm sure you'll be vice-president of the company within months. I'll have to fight to hold on to my position, with you breathing down my neck."

Mitsuzane returns the smile after a few seconds, giving Takatora's shoulder a shove. "Go away. Let me study."

Takatora leaves the room still smiling.

He will raise Mitsuzane as their father raised him, and everything will be all right.

XXX

_I'm not ready for this._

Akira sobs the words into her pillow, over and over, though they are not nearly enunciated enough to be comprehensible if Kouta wanders into the room.

She's won. After all the work and desperate effort she's put in to make sure that she and Kouta will stay together, she's won. She will be Kouta's guardian. She will take care of him. She will raise him, help him through the grief they both feel, help him become the brilliant, beautiful, kind young man their parents always told him he could be.

She will, once she convinces herself that this hasn't been an absolutely terrible mistake.

It would have been easier if she failed in her quest. It would have been easier if the social worker and the lawyer and the judge told her no, she was not ready for this; no, she could not take her younger brother; no, they would give this task to someone else.

Easier, but not right. Kouta needs her. She is his touch-stone, his connection to family and past and, hopefully, his bridge to the future.

Who could love her taciturn brother as well as she can? Who could know him as well as she does—his skills, his strengths, his foibles?

Who could love him as unconditionally as she can?

No one.

Not to say that there aren't decent foster-families out there, good people looking to make a difference who could care for Kouta, but he is her brother and he needs her.

(And she needs him. She needs to know that she has done all she can for him, needs to know that he is safe, that she hasn't failed her only surviving family. She needs to be able to talk with him, about their parents, about their past.)

Drawing a deep breath, she stifles the sobs, pushing the fear and pain as far away as she can. She has a job; she has an apartment; she has faith in herself, in her ability to learn what she must and ask for help when she must and keep _going_, no matter what road-blocks fall into her path.

(She doesn't need college or romance or a future of her own so much as she needs Kouta and their future together.)

Even if she isn't ready for this, she's determined to do it, and hopefully that will make enough of a difference.

XXX

_I failed you._

Takatora knew it when he took up his sword against the brother he raised—the brother he _loved—_but he couldn't say it. Couldn't think it, couldn't allow it to be real, couldn't allow the guilt to belong to anyone but Mitsuzane. It was Mitsuzane who chose his course, after all. Mitsuzane who betrayed his friends, who betrayed his brother, who betrayed all of the human race to the monsters from another world because he couldn't shift his vision enough to permit change.

And most of the guilt is Mitsuzane's. Even now, even drowning in the shadows that Mitsuzane flung him into, Takatora will admit that Mitsuzane is old enough and smart enough to accept some of the guilt for his crimes.

Some, but not all, because he was following in someone else's footsteps when he made his choices.

"_You're sure there's no other way?"_

It was the only thing Mitsuzane said on the way back from the fallen city to Yggdrasil's carefully guarded portal. It was the only time he looked back—a half-step's hesitation, a brief turn of his head, a flexing of his fists.

"_There's no other way. Don't you think I'd have found it if there was?"_

The words were sharp, and Mitsuzane took them to heart. Gave up on the world and saved only those most important to him, until he had whittled that list down to a shadow of the girl who loved him when he was innocent.

Takatora hadn't meant for that. He meant to take the weight of responsibility from Mitsuzane's shoulders. He meant to play the martyr, to have one more person convinced that it was a _sacrifice_ Takatora was making, showering in the blood of a world's worth of people.

And maybe it could have been.

Maybe it _would _have been a sacrifice, if Takatora was fair in his dealing out of death, but it was never equitable. Oh, there was a _pretense _of it in discussions, a debate about what traits should be saved, but there were decisions made from the start that made it unfair.

Mitsuzane was never in danger of dying.

Their father—old, redundant genetically with both Takatora and Mitsuzane saved—was never in danger of dying.

They doled out life to keep the loyalty and silence of Yggdrasil's employees, and in that silent hypocrisy Mitsuzane learned just as much as he did from Takatora's words.

_I will surpass you, brother._

The word is a quiet hiss, a whisper in his ear, a sound that cannot exist and that Takatora still hears clearly.

Who is to say what exists behind death, though? And he is surely dead, drowning in cold and darkness and ocean water.

_I will be the man you couldn't bring yourself to be. _The whisper drags knives through Takatora's heart, but he doesn't try to deny it, to turn away from it. What is the point in denial?

Perhaps if he had intentionally ended his fight with Mitsuzane—worked to disarm and capture rather than destroy his brother—he would have strength and reason to fight against the darkness and the voices.

(Perhaps he might even have succeeded, though he was still recovering from Ryouma's betrayal, bleeding physically and emotionally from half-healed wounds, and returning to Mitsuzane's betrayal had been too much.)

Instead he went for the kill and froze, remembering the little boy he threw into the air until he giggled, remembering the silent shadow that followed him throughout his life.

A shadow he shaped with his voice and his actions in equal measure, and Takatora is silent as he gives himself over to the rhythmic flow of cold silence around him, broken only by the hiss of his most spectacular failure whispering in his ear.

XXX

_I failed you._

Akira studies Kouta, sleeping across from her on one of the cots they've set up in the resistance's headquarters.

In the shell of what had once been Kouta's place to be free, to be happy, to dance with friends and dream of being something more than what she had been able to offer him.

Where did she choose wrong? Where did she make a mistake?

She tried to keep him grounded while still letting him dream. She tried to let him grow at his own pace, to come to his own conclusions about what was important and what was not. She tried to show him by example what it meant to be an adult—to be a _good_ adult—and she had thought, for so long, that she was succeeding.

Thought when he took up part-time job after part-time job that he was learning responsibility, learning how hard one had to work just to make the necessities of life available.

Thought when he quit those jobs that he was learning how difficult prioritizing was, that he was caught between the safety of his friends in an increasingly hostile world and the responsibility that came from running a household.

Thought that she taught him to be a good man, and perhaps that's where she went wrong.

Perhaps she taught him too well.

Kouta is studying her in return, she realizes with a start, his eyes open, bright and honest as they ever have been. "Sis? Are you all right?"

Is she all right? She has lost the life she gave so much to create, the carefully crafted world where she and Kouta are safe and happy. She has been tortured by monsters from beyond the known universe. She is losing her brother, watching him give away his humanity piece by piece as he and his friends strive desperately to save the world. "Are _you _all right?"

"I..." Kouta's voice is quiet, though steady. He reaches out with one hand toward her, and she leans forward, grasps his fingers in the tightest grip she can. "I'm scared."

"Of course you are." She doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, and the sound that emerges somehow holds a bit of both. "But you'll be all right. You're tough. You're brave."

"And so are you." He squeezes her hand once, gently. "Thank you so much for everything you've done."

"Don't talk like that." Stroking his hair back from his face, she remembers the child he was, the boy that she could lift into her arms. "We're both getting out of here. No matter what it seems like... no matter how strange and weird... we're both getting out of here, and we'll be okay."

"I hope so." He smiles up at her, still so guileless.

She kisses his forehead, sings until his eyes close, a lullaby that she used in the time after their parents died. In the time when it was just her and him, and she thought she could protect him from the world until he was ready.

In the time when she dreamed of the future, and what a good, reliable, wonderful man Kouta would be.

And he is good—better than good, he is _great_. Trustworthy, kind, able to forgive every transgression...

He is a hero, in every sense of the word.

But heros, as every adult knows, aren't meant to exist in the real world. All people, adults say, are flawed, broken, hypocritical in some way, to match their flawed, broken, hypocritical world.

She cries as she sings, and hopes none of the children that they have failed will notice.

XXX

"_I miss him_."

So soft and yet so forceful, the words that finally escape Takatora's mouth after he spends almost a minute staring down at his hands.

Oren settles back in his seat with a sigh, his expression full of pity.

Akira stares at him in something like horror, and Takatora hastens to find words to assuage the spike of guilt that travels through his heart—the spike of anger that undoubtedly travels through hers. "I know I still have him. I know that Mitsuzane isn't dead, that I'm... incredibly lucky that both of us have come through this with our lives."

Akira looks away, her lips pressed into a thin line.

Oren inclines his head. "I'm very glad that you survived, Takatora. There was more than enough blood shed in that pointless war."

Takatora nods, finding his hand rubbing at his thigh. He still hurts, sometimes—often, if he's completely honest—but he's learned to live with the aches and pains. Learned to be glad that he hurts, that he is alive and capable of comprehending and responding to pain, rather than the brain-dead husk that he would have been without Kouta's intervention. "I would never deign to encroach upon the grief and sorrow that all those who lost loved ones to death must be feeling. But..."

Akira turns back to him, and maybe that wasn't anger in her face before, because there is no sign of it now. Now there is just pain, tightening her eyes, turning her voice to a husky whisper. "But you had plans. Dreams. Hopes."

"Yes." Takatora finds his gaze moving again to his hands, unable to face her too-direct, too-honest gaze. Unable to bear admitting this in front of the woman who has lost so much more than he has, but she _asked_ him to speak about what is bothering him, and she has't told him to stop yet. "He's such a brilliant boy. Young man."

"Nothing childish about any of the survivors." Oren sips from his tea cup, and there is a distance to his gaze that tells Takatora he is thinking of Jounouchi. "They burned whatever childish bits of themselves they had to come through the war. For some... it was good. They learned to let go of selfishness. Of self-aggrandizement. Of thinking violence could be a game... or anything other than violence. For others..."

"He hates himself. He hates himself so much he can't even muster up enough residual hate to lob at me." Takatora reaches out and takes his own tea cup in hand, focusing hard to keep the glass from shaking. "Not that he shouldn't have regrets—the things he did..."

"Were terrible." Akira presses her lips together. "Were things he should never forget—horrors he should never forget. The way he disregarded life... the way he turned on his friends... the way he turned on you... the way he thought about Mai... it was all horrible."

Takatora nods, knowing the list of Mitsuzane's crimes intimately. He has counted them all at night, as he counts his own crimes, unsure which list to find more horrifying. Mitsuzane's, because he slid from one monstrous mistake to the next? Or his own, even though the worst of them were never completed, because it was in their shadow that Mitsuzane learned to plan and make decisions? "He's asked me if he should be locked up. If I could use some of our family's remaining funds to create a prison for him. I think he would commit some new crime if he thought it would get him the punishment he deserves."

Akira's palm strikes against the table, rattling all of their glasses. "And what purpose would that serve?"

Takatora blinks at her, uncertain where this rash of righteous anger came from. Seeing echoes of her brother, in her eyes, in the set of her mouth, as she glares between him and Oren.

"If we locked him up, what would it change?" Akira gestures out past them, at the city. "Who would it help? Would it bring back the dead? Would it help any of these people rebuild?"

"No." Oren sighs. "It would just make things worse."

"Tell him that, next time he wants to mope and be depressed." Akira stabs a finger at him. "Tell him that if he really wants to atone, he keeps doing what he's doing. Helping you. Helping the city. Doing everything Kouta would do if... if he were here. If he could."

Takatora musters up a smile, though he can feel how thin and frayed it must look. "I'll be sure to tell him you said so."

Akira's anger fades away as quickly as it came, and she reaches out, resting her hand atop his. "And mourn for the boy you loved. Mourn for what the world could have been—_should_ have been—and what he could have been in it. As long as you keep acknowledging and loving and helping the man Mitsuzane is now—"

Oren's hand tops Akira's, and he smiles. "No matter how frustrating and depressing he may be."

"Feel free to miss who he could have been." Akira leans back in her seat, breaking the moment of connection between the three of them as she draws her hand away. "That's what these meetings are half about, right? How to help raise young survivors of the near-apocalypse in a city we're trying very hard to ressurect from ghost-town status?"

The joke falls heavily into the silence at the table, and Takatora glances at Oren. Oren has Jounouchi, still looking to him as a mentor as he attempts to reassemble his life; Takatora has Mitsuzane; and Akira...

Akira has the other dancers, the children that Takatora used as guinea pigs once upon a time, coming to her as a surrogate for Kouta, but she does not have the boy she was raising before all this happened.

"To the ghosts of dreams past, may they rest in peace." Oren raises his teacup. "And to new dreams of the future, may they shine just as brightly as the old ones, until we find the proper path."

Three glasses clink together, and Takatora savors the bitter taste of crushed dreams and the sweet promise of new hopes.

XXX

_I miss him._

She bakes a cake.

It's ridiculous. She knows that it's ridiculous, knows that she could never eat a whole cake by herself, especially since she uses their normal cake-pan rather than a smaller version. She knows that it's just pouring salt on her own open wounds, but she still goes through the motions, beating flour and eggs and sugar and tiny candies together until she has a pan full of batter and a head full of memories that _aren't_ from the last year.

The first time she made him a birthday cake it ended terribly.

She hadn't thought that it would be as difficult as it was. She had been cooking for them for months, after all, and she had managed a simple but very passable menu well. Surely a cake couldn't be that much more difficult.

She hadn't considered that most of her cooking until then had been simple soups and rice dishes, with very little baking. She hadn't expected to get home late from work and have to rush to get the cake batter prepared so that maybe, just maybe, the cake would be edible before Kouta was supposed to go to bed.

She hadn't realized how many different types of flour and sugar there were, and how very poorly substitutions could go.

Kouta had still eaten the cake. Even though it was a lumpy, misshappen mess that brought her closer to crying than she had been since the night her adoption of him went through, he had clapped his hands and demanded that she ice it and put candles on it and give it to him and he had eaten three-quarters of it. He hadn't even gotten sick from it—or at least he hadn't told her.

He usually ate three-quarters of the cake, Akira restraining herself to eating just small pieces while Kouta would take large chunks until the cake seemed to vanish into the aether of its own accord.

The cake this year turns out beautifully. She doubts even Charmant could have created a lighter, more beautiful cake. She decorates it, humming as the white frosting goes on, as she adds swirls of color from the store-bought tubes of icing.

(She tries not to think of their armor as she draws—orange for Kouta, yellow for the Baron boy that Kouta killed to save the world, purple for the traitor who lives and mourns with Takatora while _her_ brother is gone, gone, _gone—_)

She stops decorating, because her hands are shaking too badly to hold the tubes, and begins placing candles. One for every year she's known him.

One for the squawling thing her parents brought home from the hospital, and she was both fascinated and repulsed by him, asking her father if perhaps he was broken and needed to go back for repairs when he wouldn't stop screaming.

One for the five-year-old who jumped down the school steps into her arms, trusting her to catch him, not blaming her the time they both fell and he broke his arm.

One for the ten-year-old who wanted her to ride around the neighborhood on her bicycle with him, but she was too old for things like that, and didn't he have friends?

One for the fifteen-year-old who danced so happily with his friends, and she cheered and clapped and went to all his performances during that first month. Before it became just a thing that he and many of the other children did, not something to be celebrated or even noted, and if she had known then where it would end...

She sits down on the kitchen floor after she places the last candle, her face in her hands, dry sobs shuddering her breath though no tears trickle from her eyes.

Perhaps she's already cried enough for him—for the boy she loved, for the man he became when the world needed him, for the godling who left her behind. Perhaps she doesn't have tears left to cry, just aching empty holes that rock her body to its core.

She doesn't hear the doorbell the first time it rings.

That's not entirely true, though, because by the third time it rings its quiet song, she knows that it has rung before. Is vaguely annoyed at it, really, for interrupting her _now_, when it's eight at night and dark outside and she just wants to wallow in her grief as she usually isn't able to do.

After a pause of three or four minutes the bell rings again, quietly insistent, and she gathers herself up and heads to open it.

Takatora stands on her threshold, impecable as always in his suit, a box held in his right hand. Only his eyes display his uncertainty, flickering up and down her, flickering into her apartment and then back to her. "I'm sorry to intrude. If I'm interrupting anything..."

"No. Not really." Akira pushes strands of hair back behind her ears, into a semblance of order, though she doesn't bother to hide the exhaustion on her face. Takatora has become a dear friend over the last few months, helping her to rebuild Zawame City... helping her deal with what Kouta has become. If not for him and Oren... but that doesn't bear thinking about, not tonight of all nights. "Do you need help with something?"

"Do you mind if I come in?"

When she steps away from the door and gestures into the room, Takatora enters slowly. He has recovered, piece by piece and gruelling step by step, from what his brother did to him, but he still moves carefully, especially when he is tired.

Once the door is closed he bows to her, just slightly. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. And don't bother being so formal." Akira crosses to the couch, settling down, hoping that Takatora will follow her. "This is no different from us meeting at the cafe, is it?"

"It is, but not because of the location." Takatora follows her, settling down on the couch with a barely audible sigh. He holds out the package. "A gift from Oren. He told me what today is, and thought... well, he wanted you to have this. Said feel free to do whatever you wish with it, including throw it out the window."

With a sinking feeling inside Akira takes the box, handling it as though it were a bomb that could go off at any moment. The top opens smoothly, and she looks down to see exactly what she was afraid of seeing.

A cake, small, just the size for two, maybe three people to share... or one person to eat over the course of a few days. Fruit is piled high in the icing, a dozen different kinds—a dozen different weapons that Kouta wielded, and she wishes he had _told_ her when everything escalated, wishes she had _seen_ instead of hearing second-hand—but the one at the top, the one in the center of the cake, is two orange slices arranged like a cross.

She was wrong.

She does have tears left to cry, and they flood down her face, sobs strangling her voice as she very carefully settles the box down on the floor, grabs a pillow, and curls up fetal to weather this latest storm.

She doesn't know how long it is before the noises that Takatora is making begin smoothing out into words, before the warmth of his hand on her shoulder becomes more than just a heat pressing away the cold shivers.

It is only his hand that touches her shoulder, the rest of him still held carefully—properly—away, but from Takatora it means a great deal.

"—truly, deeply regret..." Takatora's voice trails off, and he blinks at her, his lips pressing together into an uncertain expression. "Are you...?"

"No." Akira laughs, a tired, sad sound. "I'm not all right. It's my brother's birthday—my one surviving family member—and he's not here. Because he sacrificed his humanity and became a god to save the world. And you're one of a half-dozen people I could actually say that to without them giving me a pitying look, because clearly I just can't handle the horror of my baby brother being one of Zawame's casualties."

"It's better for the world that they don't go looking for the Snake or his gifts."

"I _know_." Akira hisses out the words before forcing herself to take a deep breath. "I know why we're not fighting the official stories. I know that it's unbelievable to most people. Probably the only ones who would maybe believe us are the Americans, and that's just because they're still looking for someone to blame for the bombs, and who better than the biblical Snake in the Garden? But..."

"It's lonely." Takatora's hand tightens on her shoulder before he releases her. "Knowing what others don't. And unfair... knowing how much of a hero Kouta was, how much he sacrificed, and having no one else acknowledge it."

"Yes." Akira wipes a hand across her face. "Though... it isn't no one. You do. Oren does. Zack... the dance leader who was so badly hurt... he has nothing but praise for Kouta. All the survivors who were there... but even if the world _did_ acknowledge what he did..."

"You would still be mourning your brother."

"I now have two birthday cakes and no Kouta." Akira presses her lips together, refusing to cry again. "I can't slap at his hand for stealing frosting. I can't warn him that if he keeps eating that much cake he's going to regret it when he turns forty. He's never going to turn forty. He's _gone_, Takatora. He saved me and he saved the world and there's a _god_ out there with his face and his memories and I love him, _so_ much, I love him when he comes back... but my little brother is gone, and _I miss him_."

The admission hangs in the air, full of months' worth of grief and sorrow.

"I miss him, too." Takatora whispers the words. "I know it's nothing compared to your grief. But your brother was a good man, a hero... someone you can be proud of. I only knew him for a little bit, but I wish I had gotten to know him longer, and... I miss both him and the world he represents."

"Don't say that." Her words come out harsher than she intended, and Akira reaches out, taking Takatora's hand in hers. "Don't say the world he represents. He wasn't _representing_ anything. He was a young man with a big heart, and he did what he thought was right. And if you like what he tried to make, you'll help me keep trying to make a world where something like this can't ever happen again."

"I will." Takatora squeezes her hand. "You know that my family's resources are at your disposal."

The same resources that put Kouta in a situation to do... what he had to do. The resources built on exploiting horror and marketing survival. The resources that made one deeply, terribly flawed but good man in Takatora and one selfish, half-broken young man in Mitsuzane.

(Akira can forgive Mitsuzane, because Kouta and Mai forgave him, but she cannot help watching the younger Kureshima brother warily, now that she knows what role he played in everything. Can't help watching Takatora with envy, when he asks haltingly for help with one thing or another with Mitsuzane, because _his _brother, traitor to the human race, killer of friends and siblings, is still alive, still _here_, while Kouta is gone.)

Takatora is still looking at her with those intense dark eyes of his, though there's a dawning note of panic in the lines starting to furrow his eyebrows. Takatora is a man of action—he analyzes a problem, finds a solution (even if it is terrible and unthinkable), and does whatever is necessary to reach that solution.

There is only so much that can be done with a crying woman on a couch, though. Nothing he can do to fix the problem, and no further apologies he can give or she can accept for all that has gone before.

There are only birthday cakes for a man who will never age again, and regrets that it will take both of them years to overcome.

"Share a birthday cake with me?" Akira manages to smile, though her voice wavers. "That's all I want from the Kureshimas right now, I think. Stay for a while and eat some cake with me."

"Gladly." Takatora reaches down and retrieves the box from the floor, handing it to her with a gravity that almost makes her laugh. "I... would like to hear more about Kouta, if you don't mind talking about him."

"You might regret asking that." Akira smiles for real, standing and heading to the kitchen to get two forks.

Takatora stays for hours, eating with quiet dignity and listening to her tell story after story of the boy who would one day become a god.

When she shuts the door behind him after midnight, Akira doesn't cry, though she still misses her brother dearly.

Instead she places the appropriate number of candles in the cake that she made, takes a deep breath, and blows them out.

Gods may not have birthdays, but she will celebrate his for the rest of her life, marking out time in the calendar of what might have been while making certain that his sacrifice was not made in vain.


End file.
